A cardinal hiding in plain sight
Hello friends. How are you spending Memorial Day weekend? For us, it’s more of the same stay-at-home routine we’ve been doing for over two months now. Today I’m feeling tired of it all and just want to get together with our kids and grandkids and hug each and every one of them until their stuffing pops out (well, not really, no eruptions wanted, just good big hugs).
I think the cloudy weather this morning has something to do with my mood. Though the greens all around us are eye-poppingly bright, the crab apple blossom petals are falling like snow across the street and the rose colored blossoms next door have faded or fallen.
Impermanence
Permanence and Impermanence
On one hand I am reminded of impermanence everywhere I look in nature. And on the other hand, this stay-at-home world I’m living in feels all too permanent. I can understand why people are going out to beaches and restaurants and getting together outside with friends. But I still think the best thing we can do is to stay at home as much as possible. Though it seems permanent, this will not last forever.
This is life. The things we don’t like seem to last forever. And the things we do like seem to fly by all too quickly.
Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose. — Yoda
I’ve just finished scanning letters my Dad wrote to my Mom while he was in the army at Fort Bragg in New Jersey. And now I’ve begun working on old family photos. Today I’m scanning a photo album I put together for my parents as a Christmas present in 1974.
A page from the photo album
The story of the photo album
When I was a senior in college I was determined to take only tuition money from my father for my final year of college ($600 for the year). Though I worked the summer before my senior year, living expenses took most of my meager earnings. But I found a way to maintain my independence. For room and board my best friend and I got a job cooking for a new fraternity. We planned menus, bought groceries, cooked lunch and dinner every day except for weekend nights for a little over 30 hungry college-aged young men. Our budget for food was $1 per frat member per day, so each week we scoured the weekly grocery store ads to plan our menus around the cheapest cuts of meat and whatever else was on sale. It was quite an experience.
For spending money that year I typed papers for guys in the fraternity or sold old textbooks when money was really scarce. That Christmas I had no money to spend on gifts for my parents. So I bought an inexpensive photo album, gathered up old family photos, grouped and curated them into a semblance of order, and added quotes from poetry and other sources, that I painstakingly hand-wrote on thin onion skin paper. I spent hours and hours creating that album. Looking back I’m not sure how I did it all — classes, cooking, making that album, and let’s not forget, spending time (lots of time) with Jon. Oh, to be that young again and have that much energy!
A page from the album — My dad on the farm, with his mom, and with one of my brothers
A journey back in time
Scanning the pages of that album today has been a journey back in time. Unfortunately over the years after I created it my mom removed photos (I’m not sure why but she must have had a use for them) and stuck other photos in willy-nilly. At first I was angry about how she had treated this precious gift I had made for them. But then I realized that it was lovely that she cared enough to add photos or that some photos found other uses. Note to self — when giving a gift it’s useful to remember that the recipient gets to choose what they do with it.
I also realized that my creating this album was a clue about my eventual love for photography. Back in film days I found photography expensive and unpredictable. I simply couldn’t afford to do enough photography to learn its fundamentals at that time. Shooting with an Instamatic camera and not understanding the fundamentals of photography was a lesson in humility. So many of my photographs did not turn out well. It wasn’t until digital camera technology matured enough to make photography affordable that my love for it led me to learn more about it.
A time for everything
Timing is everything. When our daughters were in school and both of us were working full-time I didn’t have time for photography and digital technology was still in its infancy. When I look back on my life I see that everything that has happened has taught me lessons. My falling in love with photography came at just the right time.
Someday most of us will be looking back on this time of isolation, some of us with relief that it’s over and others of us with nostalgia for the slower pace of life and opportunity to just be. Perhaps this is a new beginning that we cannot fully understand yet. And perhaps we will learn something from it. Perhaps not.
May you walk in beauty.
In our neighbor’s yard, this crab apple tree remains bright
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